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Keep in mind that to use a newsletter service like mailchimp or constantcontact, all users would have to double opt-in to the newsletter:
i) first, they would each have to sign up for the newsletter on the appropriate site (whichever one you choose),
ii) an email would be sent to their email addresses, and a confirmation link would have to be clicked, asking them to confirm they, indeed, wish to sign up for the newsletter.

Is this newsletter going to be a regular mail-out?
If not, it might not be worthwhile going this route.

. . .
When you ask if it is going to be a regular mail-out, what does that mean?
. . .

I mean, are you planning to send out a newsletter once a year, once a month, once a week, etc.?
If it is going to be a one-time mass mail-out, having people go through the double opt-in process might not be worth the trouble.

You might be better off sending out 500 emails a day (or whatever your ISP allows) through your regular email client.

Or some CMS products offer this functionality too, for example, salesforce.com, Maximizer, Sugar, etc. Do you use a CMS package in your office?

I mean, are you planning to send out a newsletter once a year, once a month, once a week, etc.?
If it is going to be a one-time mass mail-out, having people go through the double opt-in process might not be worth the trouble.

You might be better off sending out 500 emails a day (or whatever your ISP allows) through your regular email client.

Or some CMS products offer this functionality too, for example, salesforce.com, Maximizer, Sugar, etc. Do you use a CMS package in your office?

Ok this is so informative, it's great - thank you!

So basically what we want is for the recipients to either sign up for our newsletter, or donate to our site.
So this would be a one-time email, unless they sign up.

Now, you said this can be done through our "regular mail client". What is that? You mean our site host? Is this what it means? We are hosted by a company called PEER 1, so I am assuming you mean that usually hosting companies also have the ability to send out emails for us? It's like a built-in service that everyone has?

Then you mentioned ISP (which I had to google). How are they related to this? My ISP at my home is TW, and at my office I think it might be ATT.

Sorry I don't mean to make this complicated and you don't have to answer questions that are irrelevant. I just grew curious.

CMS - have no clue what that is (:
I am in SaleForce.com right now looking into their product (still trying to figure out what it is they are doing).

. . .
Now, you said this can be done through our "regular mail client". What is that?
. . .

Your regular email client is Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird, ... whatever product you use to send and receive emails.
If the mail-out is going to be one time, you could just copy-and-paste addresses from the Excel document to the email client and send out the email that way.

The number of emails you can send out is usually specified by your ISP (Internet Service Provider). Some companies restrict outgoing emails to 500 per day, 1000 per day, or some other number. You would have to find out what your limit is if you want to consider this option further.

CMS is Customer Management Software, like Salesforce. This is the product that companies use to contain all the information about their customers, for example, contact names, titles, addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, etc.--any information you want to retain on your customers. If you are already using saleforce.com, you should be able to add all the customer information into saleforce, and do the mail out from there.

Copy/pasting that many addresses would be quite a pain. I use Filemaker Pro for this kind of thing (although I never send that many email, it would work nonetheless). If you have access/know FMP, then import your email adresses, define the message body in a field and write a tiny script to send the mails. You can also set limits for how many mails to send and mark off the records that already have received emails, etc. Pretty simple to set up.

Another thing to consider is that some email marketing services offer a free or heavily discounted service to charities. I'm not 100% sure but I think GetResponse or Aweber do (there's a good list of email marketing companies here that you can check: https://www.ventureharbour.com/email...ools-one-best/).

Sending emails to 50k plus database is not a big thing. In fact, there are a tons of email marketing service providers which can do the job not just 'in full and on time' but will provide a fantastic set of automations and analytics to support you in sharpening the campaigns further.

Plus the delivery rates vary from good to brilliant. So does the pricing.

I came across a very interesting list covering the pros, cons and pricing and suitability to the need, check it out (< a href="www.thepracticalmarketer.com/bestemailmarketingsoftware/"><a/>)